President Barack Obama’s campaign will do anything to get him elected, GOP political operative Ralph Reed told Florida Republicans Feb. 16.

“So if you can’t run on your economic record, you can’t run on your foreign policy record, there’s only one kind of campaign to run,” Reed said. “And that is a scorched earth, negative, ‘tear down the Republican nominee’ campaign. And that’s all this is going to be. And they’re coming, and they’re coming with a knife in an alley. That’s what this fight is going to be like.”

Reed told his audience not to underestimate Obama or his campaign team.

“There is nothing they will not do to win an election,” Reed said. “This guy is as tough and as mean and as cynical as any politician you’ll ever see. There is nothing he’s not willing to do.”

Reed is the founder of the Faith and Freedom Foundation and former head of the Christian Coalition. In 2006, he ran for lieutenant governor of Georgia but lost in the primary, partially due to the disclosure of business ties to disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

Despite trailing Rick Santorum in most recent national polls, Mitt Romney appears to have momentum on his side in Michigan and a big lead in Arizona, just four days before both states hold Republican presidential primaries.

In Michigan, two new automated, recorded-voice surveys show Romney with a small, single-digit lead. The two polls, from Rasmussen Reports and Mitchell Research , were both conducted on Thursday, Feb. 23, and are the first to be fielded in Michigan entirely following Wednesday night’s nationally televised candidate debate.

The Rasmussen Reports poll gives Romney a six-point lead over Santorum (40 to 34 percent), a reversal from the four-point Romney deficit the firm found just three days earlier. The Mitchell Research poll shows Romney three points ahead of Santorum (36 to 33 percent), a big shift from the nine-point Santorum lead the firm reported one week earlier.

The new findings are slightly better for Romney than the results of five other surveys conducted earlier in the week, which collectively described a very close race between the top two candidates, ranging from a four-point Santorum lead to a two-point Romney advantage.

The HuffPost Pollster’s Michigan chart, which attempts to smooth out random variation in the all public polling data, shows that the biggest change over the past week has been an increase in support for Romney. Over the same period, Santorum’s numbers have declined only slightly. The chart’s trend lines now give Romney a very slight lead over Santorum (36.3 to 34.7 percent), followed by Ron Paul (11.2 percent) and Newt Gingrich (8.0 percent).

Rick Santorum Cast Himself As ‘Progressive Conservative,’ Non-Reaganite In First Campaign

Making his first run for Congress in the early 1990s, this candidate promised not to be a Reagan Republican, fashioned himself a progressive conservative, said he was impartial on unions and stayed vague on abortion rights.

It’s a description that fits Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor whose past political pursuits in that state have weighed down his current presidential ambitions. But in this case, it applies to former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, whose own political origins have been explored in far less depth.

In his circuitous path to the top of the primary polls, Santorum has presented himself as the pure conservative alternative to Romney. But an extensive review of newspaper archives and interviews with officials involved in his successful 1990 congressional race against Rep. Doug Walgren (D-Pa.) suggests that Santorum was cut from a similar GOP cloth as his current adversary.

Santorum insisted that he was the one who is more in touch. ‘From child care to taxes, we’re right for this district. This district has had enough of government sticking its nose constantly in our business,’ he said, insisting nonetheless that he is not a Reagan Republican.

The Reagan line echoes Romney’s own memorable remark from his 1994 Senate campaign, when he said that he didn’t “want to return to Reagan-Bush.”

Santorum reportedly made a similar statement on a separate occasion. According to an October 28, 1990 piece in the Pittsburgh Press, the afternoon newspaper that eventually became part of thePost-Gazette, he described himself as a “progressive conservative” in his campaign manual.

It’s my firm believe that the cockroach will not be the only survivor of a nuclear holocaust. It’s possible that Orly Taitz will be among the surviving species as well.

No matter how many times the Court has knocked her down by dismissing her cases before them, she gets back up and continues her frenetic attempts for someone in a judicial capacity to not only hear what she has to say, but to adjudicate her findings.

Orly Taitz took her anti-Obama birther crusade to GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich on Monday, only to come up empty-handed. Again.

At a campaign event in Pasadena, Calif., Gingrich took questions after delivering a stump speech blasting , among other things, “President Obama’s war on the Catholic Church” and the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which recently overturned California’s same-sex marriage ban.

After answering concerns about the state of his campaign following a slide in recent polls and primary contests, Taitz came forward, suggesting that the birther issue could provide a “boost ” to his candidacy if he made it a hallmark issue.

“Somebody who wouldn’t be good enough, who wouldn’t be certified to pick tomatoes or clean bathrooms is sitting in the White House,” Taitz told Gingrich, reportedly to a mixed reception from the largely Tea Party audience.

“That’s a project you should pursue,” Gingrich responded. He went on to say that with ongoing economic issues and other mismanagement he saw in the president’s agenda, he had “enough issues to debate Obama about.”

Taitz, a California attorney and dentist, is one of the most outspoken members of the birther movement, whose adherents claim that Obama is ineligible to serve as president because he isn’t actually a U.S. citizen. (In fact, the White House has released the president’s long-form birth certificate, in hopes of quelling the conspiracy theories.) Taitz, who specifically believes that the president has forged his official documents, made something of a stir in Georgia last month when a judge subpoenaed Obama in a case her clients had filed attempting to bar Obama from the state’s primary ballot. Obama’s legal team ignored the judge’s order, however, and the case proceeded without him. It was eventually dismissed by the judge, who determined that Obama was eligible to be on Georgia’s primary ballot in March.

This is far from over, but the one thing this does assure, is that Scott Walker will have to run for his seat again, and given the fact that one million signatures were collected to force a recall election, I’m not certain that he will win a second time. In this case, I believe “voters remorse” will be the one driving force that will kick Walker out…

Democrats needed to collect 540,208 signatures to trigger a gubernatorial recall election against Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R). On Tuesday, they announced they had far exceeded that number, collecting more than one million signatures.

Tuesday was the deadline for recall organizers, led by the group United Wisconsin, to turn in their petitions. The number collected is 185 percent of the signatures required to force a recall election. Organizers also collected enough to trigger a recalls of the lieutenant governor and four Republican state senators.

The total went far beyond Walker’s expectations.

“From what they say, they’re probably going to turn in 720,000 today,” Walker said in an interview with right-wing radio host Rush Limbaugh Tuesday afternoon. “That’s a lot of signatures, but they’ve been planning this since late last spring. They’ve got tons of money from the big government unions in Washington and around the country.”

Mitt Romney said Saturday night that it pains him to fire workers in order to make a company more profitable, responding to criticism from Newt Gingrich, who cited a New York Times story on one of Romney’s ventures.

“It always pains you if you have to be in a position of downsizing a business in order to make it more successful,” Romney said. “I’m not surprised to have the New York Times try to put free enterprise on trial…It’s a little surprising from my colleagues on this stage.”

Former Massachusetts Gov. Romney said that the laid-off workers are victims of the free market. “Sometimes investments don’t work and you’re not successful,” he said.

But Gingrich, the former House Speaker, questioned whether Romney’s private equity ventures were aimed at creating jobs or quick profit for capitalists.

Gingrich said he’s all for the free market, but “I’m not nearly enamored of a Wall Street model where you can go in and flip companies, have leveraged buyouts, basically take out all the money, leaving behind the workers.”

He cited 1,700 fired workers in a New York Times story on one of Romney’s corporate raids.

While speaking at a campaign rally Thursday in support of GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) mistakenly professed his faith in President Barack Obama’s ability to improve the economy.

“I am confident, with the leadership and the backing of the American people, President Obama will turn this country around,” McCain said, as seen above in a video from Goose Creek Patch.

Oh, wait, there’s video of Mr. Santorum making “the” statement and we all know that this is the information age and everything is recorded in one way or the other. So, why would Mr. Santorum deny saying that he doesn’t want to give Black people other people’s money?

Santorum took heat after saying, “I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money.” During an appearance on FOX News Channel’s “The O’Reilly Factor,” he denied ever making the comments, saying the remark was the result of “a little bit of a blurred word.”

“I looked at that, and I didn’t say that,” Santorum told O’Reilly. “If you look at it, what I started to say is a word and then sort of changed and it sort of — blah — came out. And people said I said ‘black.’ I didn’t.”

The GOP hopeful touted his past help of black colleges to further defend himself against criticism over the claims.

“And I can tell you, I don’t use — I don’t — first off, I don’t use the term ‘black’ very often. I use the term ‘African-American’ more than I use ‘black,” Santorum said. “I can tell you as someone who did more work for historically black colleges, I used to have — every year, I used to bring all the historically black colleges into Washington, DC to try to help them, because they get very little federal money through the bureaucracy, and so I help to try to introduce them to people in the Department of Education so they could have more resources.”

Santorum also got defensive over his presidential run less than a day after he took a close second place at the 2012 Iowa Caucuses, saying this campaign “isn’t my first rodeo.”

“I’ve been in a lot of tough campaigns in Pennsylvania,” Santorum said when asked if he is “ready to be demonized.”

“We’re going to have resources,” Santorum said. “We’re going to be a much bigger player than I think everybody anticipates right now.”

There was a point (see here) when I thought a primary challenge to Obama could easily come from within the Dem power structure. Obama seemed that vulnerable.

And I assumed that Hillary was positioning herself to be that person. In 1968, RFK didn’t declare his candidacy until Gene McCarthy had fatally wounded Johnson, making a safe entry possible. I saw the same strategy back then for a Clinton challenge for the crown in 2012.

But the moment passed, and hopes for a primary challenge seemed to have dimmed. (“Seemed”? Yes.)

Not only that, but the Clinton and Obama machines seem to have merged; certainly the CEOs of those machines are more and more aligned.

So I find this the next logical step — Hillary Clinton as the 2012 VP nominee. This makes her a shoe-in for the nomination in 2016 (assuming no horrid misstep betwixt), and possibly pres as well, given the current state of the opposition. So everyone’s happy:

▪ Obama can’t run again and the Dems need an heir.

▪ His daughters are too young for their dynastic turn.

▪ The Clintons still want it.

▪ Hillary as heir-apparent gives both her and the Dems another 4–8 years on the throne.

Sweet deal for them. Let Chelsea and Sasha duke it out, come their turn to seek power. That will be later; this will be now.

Here’s Robert Reich, who might know a thing or two about the Clintons, on this subject (my emphasis):

My political prediction for 2012 (based on absolutely no inside information): Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden swap places. Biden becomes Secretary of State — a position he’s apparently coveted for years. And Hillary Clinton, Vice President.

So the Democratic ticket for 2012 is Obama-Clinton. … Obama needs to stir the passions and enthusiasms of a Democratic base that’s been disillusioned with his cave-ins to regressive Republicans. Hillary Clinton on the ticket can do that. … Clinton would help deflect attention from the bad economy and put it on foreign policy, where she and Obama have shined.

Sign me up — I think Reich makes the good call.

Am I liking this? Do you think I think we need 8 more years of progressive dreams deferred? That would be No.

But my dreams are beside the point, aren’t they. You and me, we’re just God’s spies, inspecting the mystery of things. Birds in a cage, as it were.